35 Millimeters Under the Sea : Flip Nicklin, the World’s Leading Photographer of Whales, Works Where They Live

OUT OF THE HUNDREDS of hours that Flip Nicklin has spent underwater, trying to go eye to eye with whales and take their pictures, the Argentine encounter was one of his most terrifying moments.

“I was really scared, I was as scared as I have ever been with a whale,” Nicklin says as a slide of a heavily barnacled whale appears on the screen. “At the same time, I was really interested. He was excited, and it was a kind of behavior I hadn’t seen before.”

Nicklin, 40 years old and widely regarded as the premier whale photographer in the world, is recounting an incident that took place more than two years ago off the coast of Argentina. This afternoon, in the comfort of a friend’s A-frame house in the hills above Santa Cruz, he is calmly describing a 30-ton southern right whale calf that almost cost him his life.

Nicklin was in the third month of a two-year assignment for National Geographic when he came across the curious whale. He and writer Jim Darling had moved close enough to the whale to rub its chin. And before running out of film, Nicklin managed to get the shot he wanted--a close-up of the creature’s eye.

Then, work done, Nicklin did something he shouldn’t have.

“There was nothing to do and he was sitting right there, so I put my hand up to his eye so he could see what I was doing. Then I gently rubbed down over a fold of skin under his eye. Not only did he not mind, he enjoyed it. You could see his skin rippling.”

Like a submarine lumbering to life, the whale slowly moved forward, scraping its sensitive side against the tiny object that was Nicklin’s hand. When the whale completed one pass, it turned around and came back for another. Each time, its massive tail raked over Nicklin’s head, pushed him underwater and knocked off his mask.

“When I tried to stop rubbing him, he started leaning into me,” Nicklin recalls. “Pretty soon, he was moving toward me sideways, pushing me out (to sea). It was like a giant door driving you through the water. I was plastered against his side and completely out of control. He didn’t do anything aggressive; he was just like a giant puppy run amok.”

Eventually, Darling and an Argentine assistant maneuvered their boat into position to scoop Nicklin out of the water, and the trio eased away, leaving the frisky whale to work its own itch.

“They’re all strange dogs to me, and you have to think of them that way,” Nicklin says. “There were good reasons your mom told you not to pet strange animals. Whales are strange animals.”

Strange enough for National Geographic to have assigned Nicklin to work on five major whale stories in the past six years, the most recent being a 36-page centerpiece for the magazine’s December centennial issue, which featured a hologram on a striking gold cover. The spread featured 28 of the thousands of whale photos Nicklin had taken for the assignment. Among them were two of the friendly right whale.

Nicklin, a powerfully built 6-foot San Diego native who looks like a sun-leathered surfer who hasn’t quit, spent 18 months traveling the world for his latest assignment. He went underwater from the Arctic Bay to the southern tip of South America and made dives near Hawaii, Vancouver Island, Monterey Bay, Baja California, Costa Rica and the Galapagos Islands. He logged statistics that would leave only another National Geographic photographer unimpressed, racking up 150,000 air miles, spending $200,000 and reading more than 100 books.

“It was a dream assignment,” he says. “It’s like the old days when Geo said, ‘Take two years and do India.’ They told me, ‘Take two years and do whales.’ ”

Young Man and the Sea

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC editor Wilbur E. Garrett calls Nicklin “one of a kind” in the area of underwater whale photography. That’s because Nicklin had been a diver for 20 years before he picked up a camera, and his ability to free-dive, to work without scuba gear, at 60- to 70-foot depths allows him to swim near enough to record whale behavior without interrupting it.

“Whales get spooked by bubbles from a tank,” Garrett says. “Because he’s such a great free-diver, Flip can work a lot closer to the animals. He gets too close sometimes.”

Nicklin laughs when asked about the dangers of exploring the sea. He says he’s been doing it since he was 11 and feels safer under water than above. His inspiration comes from his father, Chuck Nicklin, an underwater cinematographer (“The Deep”) who started the popular Diving Locker chain in San Diego in the mid-’50s and who helped pioneer scuba instruction on the West Coast. Flip (his real name is Charles, but his dad nicknamed him after World War II comic strip hero Col. Flip Corkin) and his younger brother, Terry (he got his name from “Terry and the Pirates”), grew up around divers and, as teen-agers, were either in the water or in the family’s diving shop during summers and weekends.

In 1978, Nicklin was making $800 a month managing the Diving Locker when he signed on as a deckhand and diving assistant for a three-month National Geographic shoot near Hawaii. While most people were idolizing astronauts, Nicklin’s heroes were the magazine’s underwater photographers. Suddenly, there he was, about to work with two of the best--Bates Littlehales and Jonathan Blair--and he didn’t waste the opportunity.

“I had never shot underwater until that trip came up. So, I bought a camera and went to the Caymans for a week to practice. The first five rolls I shot were out of focus. I said, ‘God, it can’t be this hard.’ Then, I found out I had the wrong lens on.”

Nicklin shot underwater every day with Littlehales and Blair and, with their help, managed to get a couple of his pictures published with their story. One was of a fully inflated porcupine fish; the other was of a baby albatross leaping over a green turtle. Cute pictures, nothing special, he says. But the experience was life-altering.

“It was crazy how big a deal it was to be published in National Geographic,” Nicklin says. “I told anyone who would listen that I’d been published in Geographic and that they ought to hire me.”

Nicklin parlayed those two pictures into jobs at Sea World in Mission Bay (he took many of the fish identification pictures posted near the aquariums) and La Jolla-based Science Applications Inc. (he shot photos for environmental-impact studies), then began shooting sharks and whales for National Geographic.

Eight years after his first whale photos were published, Nicklin is the whale photographer in the world, and he acknowledges earning more than $100,000 a year from his magazine assignments and the sale of photos National Geographic doesn’t use.

As a kid, Nicklin spent a lot of time chasing jack rabbits and snakes in the canyons near his home in San Diego. When he thought about it at all, he thought he’d grow up to be a scientist. Luck and the National Geographic have helped him come close. “I consider myself a descriptive biologist,” Nicklin says. “I go see things and tell people about them. That I can do that and make money at it is amazing.”

Living For’The Moment’

ON THE WHALE BEAT,there is always the chance of seeing something no one has witnessed before, behavior that hasn’t yet been described in scientific literature. On one trip to the Arctic, Nicklin was underwater photographing a fight between two tusked narwhals when one of them darted toward him. The narwhal stopped with the point of his 10-foot tusk (actually, a spiraled tooth) just 18 inches from Nicklin’s chest.

“I had no idea why he came to me or what he was going to do,” Nicklin says. “He stopped for just an instant, hit me with his sonar--I could hear and feel the clicks--then went back to the fight.”

Later, when Nicklin and whale researcher John Ford were leaving Lancaster Sound, their helicopter flew over a narrow opening in the ice where dozens of narwhals “were lined up like logs.” The whales apparently had been driven there by Inuits hunting a few miles away, and Nicklin had one of those moments National Geographic photographers live for.

That night, he and Ford celebrated getting a shot they thought no one had ever seen when one of their local guides put things in perspective. “No white man with a camera had ever seen it before,” Nicklin says.

Nevertheless, it was a bonus for Nicklin, and for the magazine. The aerial of the narwhals appeared as a three-page fold-out in last month’s article. There were also rare shots of white belugas gliding upside down so that they could watch Nicklin above them, of mating right whales, of a jumping baby killer whale and of a giant gray whale--the sort currently swimming south along the coast of California--feeding off the ocean floor near Vancouver Island.

Many of the pictures are eerily similar to the “story board” sketches that Nicklin drew before setting out. Each sketch was designed to illustrate whale behavior that had been observed but never photographed. The idea was to get as many of those on film as possible and hope for breaks such as the narwhal logjam. But Nicklin says the shot he really wanted was the one that got away.

“I got into the water six times one day with a bowhead. It’s one of the rarest whales, and no one has ever photographed one underwater before.”

Nicklin says he came within 15 feet of the bowhead and shot an entire roll of film, close-up, full-frame, with a wide-angle lens. But when he got out of the water, he discovered that a drop of condensation had frozen on the shutter of his camera and there were no usable images.

“For a while, I was very depressed. I said, ‘God, I wish I had those pictures.’ But then, I thought, ‘Well, I’ve done it--I know it can be done.’ And I am going to do it.”

Nicklin will return to the Arctic for a three-month National Geographic assignment this spring. He says he loves the Arctic (“I’d rather be there than in Hawaii”) and doesn’t mind swimming in 28-degree water that’s as thick as sherbet and turns his hands into anvils in 30 minutes (“It’s a problem taking pictures when you can’t tell whether your finger pulled the trigger”). He has eaten steaming raw seal liver with the locals, been chased out of camp by a polar bear and whiled away the endless dawn playing checkers with film canister lids. On one trip, he read Lee Iacocca’s autobiography three times, and he wasn’t interested the first time.

To be a National Geographic photographer in the Arctic is to have failures that last as long as winter. After 14 weeks on his first assignment there, Nicklin says, the magazine’s picture editor told him he didn’t have one publishable shot.

“Flip has more patience than any photographer I know,” says David Doubilet, a National Geographic contract photographer who once served as Nicklin’s mentor. “Sleeping on the ice edge where the sun never sets, worrying about polar bears and getting nothing. Most photographers would say, ‘No way, I’m going home.’ Flip sticks with it until it happens, then he gets the most astounding pictures.”

He can wait weeks for the ice to break between the open seas, where the whales are backed up waiting, and the shallow water inlets and estuaries, where they want to go.

“When that crack opens,” Nicklin says, “it is like a highway. There is nothing like being on the edge of the ice when there are thousands of whales going by every day.”

Life at High Tide

NICKLIN TALKS ABOUT his life as if he had won it in a lottery. How did it happen to him ? Sure, he’d like to have a family and a warm bed every night, but he is philosophical: “One thing I learned about traveling is that you can think about where you are or you can think about where you aren’t. The trip is more fun if you think about where you are. I think that sort of goes for the whole deal.”

What do you do after you’ve done whales for National Geographic? He has the unrivaled whale photos now and they’re in great demand all over the world. Stern magazine in West Germany has already agreed to pay him $20,000 for the first rights to his latest batch of pictures; he is in the middle of negotiations with publishers in other countries, and he has just signed a contract to put together a coffee-table book that will expand on the National Geographic piece.

Nicklin says he wants to become known as an expert on the Arctic and do a book of photos on California kelp beds, which he considers one of the most interesting marine subjects. Meanwhile, he will continue to lecture at American Cetacean Society meetings as his schedule permits and photograph the behavior of whales, creatures he says we haven’t even begun to understand.

“A lot of what we think we know is myth and has become myth in the last 15 years,” Nicklin says, alluding to the international movement to end whale-hunting. “It’s great that there’s been so much attention on whales in the last few years. The deal with the trapped grays (near Barrow, Alaska), where everybody rushed up there to save them, was an amazing thing. . . .

“But we have to love whales a little less and start to see them as part of a whole system. We have to admit they eat herring and do some things that are competitive with other interests, and still not lose empathy with them.”

The dietary trend toward more white fish and the continuing recklessness of industrial polluters are renewing the rivalry between humans and whales, Nicklin says. At some point, he says, people must decide whether they’re going to leave the ocean alone or create a management plan that involves all the creatures in it.

In the meantime, Nicklin wants to know a lot more about whales.

“The more I’ve learned about whales, the more I’ve learned how much we have to learn about them,” he says. “I know a lot more about dogs than I know about whales.”

Like, don’t pet the strange ones.